1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a word/phrase classification processing method, phrase extraction method, word/phrase classification processing apparatus, speech recognition apparatus, machine translation apparatus, phrase extraction apparatus, and a word/phrase storage medium. Particularly, the present invention is suitable for extracting phrases from text data and automatically classifying words and phrases.
2. Description of the Related Art
One type of conventional word classification processing apparatus automatically classifies a single word by statistically processing the single word used in text data, and performs speech recognition and machine translation using the result of classifying the word, for example, as recited in the document titled "Brown, P., Della Pietra, V., deSouza, P., Lai, J., Mercer, R. (1992) "Class-Based n-gram Models of Natural Language". Computational Linguistics, Vol. 18, No. 4, pp. 467-479".
However, the conventional word classification processing apparatuses cannot automatically classify words and phrases together, and cannot perform speech recognition and machine translation using the correspondence or similarity between word and phrase or between phrases. Therefore, they cannot perform the speech recognition or machine translation accurately.